Most readers (and certainly this writer) will likely never visit the exorbitantly priced Dubai, which might make the following story seem less threatening. However, Dubai is emerging as the perfect insulated testing ground for a range of high-tech applications that could very well spread to many corners of the world in the near future.

The hoverbike, created in a joint project with Russian company Hoversurf, was unveiled recently at the Gitex Technology Week Exhibition. The video below demonstrates its maneuverability with a police officer on board, which they claim can operate for 25 minutes up to 43 miles per hour. However, the vehicle also can be remotely operated, permitting it to fly up to its maximum of 16 feet off the ground.

The hoverbike is expected to make its functional debut in Dubai by 2020.

This announcement follows on the heels of the launching of mini police surveillance vehicles that look like electric cars. These are set to be released in fleets to patrol the city with biometric and conventional surveillance tools. The system will augment other security robots on patrol.

The new security system is so advanced that the mini-vehicle even comes with its own drone which can be launched via a rear sleeve — both are monitored and linked to Dubai Police command room.

…the O-R3 performs 360-degree surveillance and deters potential crime with its formidable presence on site. With self-charging capability, patrol and protection is provided 24/7, all year round.

…“It can recognise people in any area and identify suspicious objects and can track suspects. It has a drone and the user [police officer] needs to access the car through fingerprint. It will be deployed at tourist destinations in Dubai,” Brigadier Al Razooqi said.

The teenager fatally shot by former Tulsa Police Officer Shannon Kepler in 2014 didn’t have a gun on or near him when officers began investigating the shooting, several law enforcement witnesses told a jury Friday.

Kepler, 57, is on trial for the fourth time on a first-degree murder charge in the Aug. 5, 2014, death of 19-year-old Jeremey Lake, who briefly dated Kepler’s estranged daughter, Lisa, after meeting her about a week before he died. Kepler’s previous trials on the same charge ended with mistrials due to hung juries in November, February and July.

Kepler has contended that he shot Lake twice in self-defense because he saw him carrying a gun, but a series of officers involved in the case against him each told jurors they didn’t recover a firearm at the crime scene, which was in the area of Lake’s aunt’s home in the 200 block of North Maybelle Avenue.

Three current or former Tulsa Police Department employees — Cpl. Amber McCarty, Michael Brown and Detective Mark Kennedy — also said Lisa Kepler identified her father as the person who shot Lake.

Brown, a former sergeant, said Lisa Kepler “came up to me screaming” at the shooting scene about Shannon Kepler’s involvement in the homicide, which made him “very surprised” based on his knowledge that Kepler was a longtime police officer.

None of them said they had any information to suggest that Lake handled a gun in any way the night he was shot.

Officer David Pyle, who testified Friday afternoon, described the scene as “chaotic” with “a lot of spectators” but also said he didn’t see a gun on Lake or Lake’s acquaintance Josh Mills, a witness Pyle transported to the Detective Division for an interview.

A U.S. Army veteran set out on a trip across Pennsylvania taking a knee at several police stations within the state to protest police brutality while playing the National Anthem.

Chris Mueller, 32, has been a one-man roving protest and says he wants to “piss off” as many people as he can while bringing attention to an important issue.

“At three in the morning one day a couple weeks back, I was trying to think of a way to piss as many people as I can off to draw attention to an important issue,” he told PhillyVoice.

Mueller has protested in Upper Moreland, Abington, Cheltenham, Philadelphia and other places while wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt along with an Uncle Sam hat and says he hopes his peaceful method of protest will inspire departments to engage citizens who’re afraid of police officers in their communities.

“This is a peaceful protest.”

“We’re supposed to peacefully protest for things we believe in in America.”

U.S. Army Veteran Chris Mueller Hopes His Protests Will Inspire Others To ‘Take A Knee’ Outside Local Police Stations Across The Country As Part Of A Peaceful Protest Against Police Brutality.
Upon arriving at his protest destinations, Mueller sets up his phone to record videos to post to his Facebook page then takes a knee saluting the flag and playing the national anthem through boombox speakers.

At City Hall in Philadelpha, Mueller played the Jimi Hendrix version, which can be heard in one of his protests videos below.

Mueller hopes his actions of aligning with other anthem-kneelers will bolster the cause among his peers and remind them taking a knee isn’t protesting the nation, the flag or the military and said he thinks Colin Kaepernick is a patriot for taking a knee during the anthem before NFL games.

A Chicago police officer who is accused of framing at least 51 people for murder will now face a new allegation: A former drug dealer says he paid Detective Reynaldo Guevara at least $1,000 a week in exchange for protection from arrest. The payments went on for two years, his lawyer told a Cook County Associate Judge today, before Guevara framed the man for a 1990 double murder.

According to the lawyer for the man in question, Jose Maysonet, he, Guevara, and another former Chicago police officer met in the back of a Cuban restaurant in Chicago’s predominantly Latino neighborhood of Humboldt Park in 1988 to propose Maysonet pay for protection. Guevara, who has since retired, was the subject of a BuzzFeed News investigation earlier this year. The other officer, Joe Miedzianowski, is currently serving a life sentence in federal court for his role in a operating a drug ring.

Maysonet’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, told BuzzFeed News that her client stopped paying after an angry confrontation with Guevara following the arrest (and suicide) of one of his associates. Three months later, Maysonet was arrested for the double murder of brothers Torrance and Kevin Wiley.

An attorney for Guevara, William Fahy, did not immediately return a phone message from BuzzFeed News.

The key piece of evidence against Maysonet was a confession, which he says Guevara coerced by beating him with a phone book and flashlight. At trial in 1995, a court found Maysonet guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

His attorney Richard Beuke, was also representing Guevara in a child support case. In a 2001 interview with FBI agents, a convicted drug dealer who worked with Miedzianowski alleged that Guevara and Beuke split under-the-table payments in exchange for Guevara allowing defendants to “buy their way” out of trouble.

Orlando, FL — Thanks to the highly flawed means of testing for drugs and incompetent armed agents of the state enforcing immoral drug laws, a man’s donut got him arrested, strip-searched, thrown in a cage and drug charges. Now, however, instead of the cops being held responsible for negligently mistaking donut glaze for meth, the taxpayers are being charged.

Daniel Rushing was just awarded $37,500 for his kidnapping and abuse at the hands of negligent cops and their continued use of faulty field drug test kits.

In fact, tens of thousands have been convicted and served time — even earning the black mark of a felony — for crimes they likely didn’t commit, according to a report, because the cases against them relied on horribly unreliable field drug test kits.

So prone to errors are the tests, courts won’t allow their submission as evidence. However, their continued use by law enforcement — coupled with a 90 percent rate at which drug cases are resolved through equally dubious plea deals — needlessly ruins thousands of lives.

Daniel Rushing, 65, is one of these people.

As TFTP reported, in December of 2015, Rushing was bringing his friend to his weekly chemotherapy session when he was stopped by police for the alleged ‘crime’ of not stopping all the way before pulling out of a gas station.

This routine revenue generating stop would quickly descend into a nightmare after this highly trained police officer would see the crumbs of a Krispy Kreme donut on Rushing’s floor board.

The officer, Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were,” she wrote, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel.

Her ‘professional’ training that has taught her how to identify all the substances deemed illegal by the state immediately set off alarms.

“I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic,” she wrote.

Rushing, who is a concealed carry permit holder, told the officer that there was a weapon in the car. Luckily he was not shot. However, he was asked to step out of the car and then the officer asked to search his vehicle.

Rushing, knowing that he had nothing to hide, agreed to the search. Even though Rushing had nothing to hide, he should have never agreed to a search as this is rule number one when dealing with police during a traffic stop.

After the fact, however, Rushing realized his mistake in allowing the officer to rummage through his car. “I didn’t have anything to hide,” he said. “I’ll never let anyone search my car again.”

Riggs-Hopkins and other officers spotted three other pieces of the suspicious substance in his car, according to the report.

“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.’”

The arrest report even noted Rushing pleaded with officers to tell them it was donut crumbs. However, they just knew that this 65-year-old man, with no criminal record, was some drug kingpin transporting meth by dropping tiny bits of it on his carpet.

“Rushing stated that the substance is sugar from a Krispie Kreme Donut that he ate,” Riggs-Hopkins wrote.

Officers then tested the Krispy Kreme crumbs with their criminally unreliable field test kits and received not one but two positive results.

As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, the director of a lab recognized by the International Association of Chiefs of Police for forensic science excellence has called field drug testing kits “totally useless” due to the possibility of false positives. In laboratory experiments, at least two brands of field testing kits have been shown to produce false positives in tests of Mucinex, chocolate, aspirin, chocolate, and oregano. Some of these kits even return a positive when completely empty.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Riggs-Hopkins booked him into the county jail on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with a firearm. He was locked up for about 10 hours before his release on $2,500 bond, he said.

“I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said.

After being kidnapped and caged because of the incompetence of police officers and the brutal drug war, Rushing sued, and as TFTP predicted last year, the taxpayers will be held accountable — not the police officers.

For kidnapping and caging an innocent man, Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins was given a written reprimand in her record — a laughable ‘punishment’ for depriving an innocent man of his freedom.

When asked how many other road-side drug tests have produced false positive results by the Orlando Sentinel, an OPD spokeswoman wrote, “At this time, we have no responsive records. … There is no mechanism in place for easily tracking the number of, or results of, field drug testing.”

As police across the US scramble to push the war on cops narrative and note that only criminals dislike the police, thousands of cases like this one play out every year. Instead of rectifying a broken system, the overwhelming majority of police and politicians ignore the problems created by the war on drugs and choose to increase force instead.

Until we bring an end to the war on drugs, innocent people like Bernstein and Cruz will continue to be targetted and continue to be kidnapped, caged, or killed — for no other reason than cops looking for arbitrary substances.

Next time someone says, “if you don’t break the law, you have nothing to fear,” show them this incident which completely destroys that dangerously ignorant narrative.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes interviewed several former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) employees who came forward to blow the whistle, accusing several Fortune 500 drug distributor companies for the epidemic opiate overdoses.

For many years, Joe Rannazzisi was the head of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control the division responsible for investigating the pharmaceutical industry consisting of pharmaceutical companies, distributors, pharmacies, as well as doctors and clinics which prescribe the highly-addictive opiates.

After years of investigations, his team finally believed they’d pinpointed the source of the abuse in the supply chain; the distributors. The DEA uncovered unscrupulous shipping of opiates to pharmacies in towns with small populations.

He had harsh criticisms for the opiate drug industry. He told correspondent Bill Whitaker:

This is an industry that’s out of control. What they wanna do, is do what they wanna do, and not worry about what the law is. And if they don’t follow the law in the drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die. This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs.

Rannazzisi identified the big three he says are the major players who have been targeted by the DEA and who quickly learned how to push back, effectively winning their fight against the DEA’s oversight. He named Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen and claimed they control 90 percent of the opiate distribution in the U.S.

The former DEA agent called it “a fact” that these companies are killing people by continuing to distribute dangerous opiates to crooked pharmacies which simply sell the goods to bad actors. Rannazzisi equated the distribution of the opiates to a band of drug dealers who were worse than street dealers:

These weren’t kids slinging crack on the Corner. These were professionals who were doing it. They were just drug dealers in lab coats.

Under the Controlled Substances Act, the distributors are supposed to report and stop shipments of suspicious orders (large shipments of opioids to people who have no legitimate need for those quantities of drugs).

Even after the distributors were fined millions of dollars by the DEA, little was done to curb the problem. The pharmaceutical distributors pushed back by recruiting lawyers from within the DEA to come and work with their companies. In essence, the drug companies recruited the very same lawyers who were writing policy for the DEA and who knew their loopholes and how to get the DEA off of their backs.

Linden Barber, who used to work for the DEA, jumped ship and went to work for the Quarles and Brady’s Health Law Group, helping clients navigate through compliance issues with the DEA.

Barber drafted the Marino Bill and lobbied Congress to introduce the bill with Tom Marino (R-PA). The bill became law, after passing without objection in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law in 2016 by President Barack H. Obama. It is known as the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, a law which Rannazzisi claimed took away the DEA’s ability to reign in the unethical and illegal distribution of opiates to pharmacies which should not be receiving millions of pills of opiates only having a few residents to serve.

The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies.

Marino then turned his attention to Rannazzisi. He asked the DEA to open an investigation into the head of the office of diversion claiming he was attempting to intimidate Congress. Rannazzisi was ultimately stripped of his supervisory leadership and he eventually resigned.

Now, according to the former DEA agent, no one up the supply chain can be held accountable for increased diversion of dangerous and addictive narcotics. Rannazzisi said now no one in a drug company can be held liable for negligence in protecting the controlled substances.

Marino, the Congressman who made it all possible, has now been nominated to be President Donald Trump’s drug czar. In other words, the lawmaker who helped get the DEA off the backs of the drug distributors is now supposedly going to be responsible for safeguarding the nation’s supply of controlled substances and making sure the drugs are not abused. For those families who have lost a loved one to an opiate overdose, having Marino as the drug czar may not be very comforting. After all, he was lobbied by the very industry which manufactures and distributes the very drugs which killed their loved ones.

In the end, Rannazzisi told Bill Whitaker:

The drug industry, the manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and chain drugstores, have an influence over Congress that has never been seen before

As TFTP has reported, more Americans died in opiate and related heroin overdoes in 2016 than in the entire Vietnam War. It is an epidemic. And in the last decade, 200,000 Americans have died from prescription opioid overdoses. It is killing more Americans than guns or automobile accidents, and no one is doing anything about it. According to Rannazzisi, the DEA’s hands are now tied to plug the holes in the supply chain. The WAPO concluded, “Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.”

As the era of “alternative facts” takes hold across the political spectrum and federal government buries its head in ignorance, lawmakers are increasingly challenging facets of the insanity. Medical cannabis is receiving particular attention, with supporters becoming even more passionate after the appointment of drug warrior Jeff Sessions to Attorney General.

According to Marijuana Moment, Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) testified in a House Judiciary Committee that medical cannabis has great potential to treat mental health issues and should be made available to everyone – including cops. Many lawmakers are trying to change VA policies to allow medical cannabis for veterans with PTSD, but Gaetz is taking this logic a step further with law enforcement.

“Our policies should follow the science and not this ridiculous, antiquated dogma perpetuated by lies through the federal government,” said Gaetz.

The legislation being considered, titled “Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017,” would delve into the mental health practices and services of LEO agencies across the country, and direct the attorney general to consult with the DoD and VA on how they treat soldiers.

Gaetz proposed an amendment which would have required agencies to examine, “Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs mental health practices and services, including medical cannabis treatment on mental health, that could be adopted by Federal, State, local, or tribal law enforcement agencies.“

As we know, drugs such as SSRIs–with harmful effects on health and public safety–are the method of choice for treating military veterans who suffer trauma after fighting in America’s wars of aggression. If patients can use a plant and its extracts for healing, which can’t be patented, this is a serious threat to the profits of Big Pharma.

After blowback from several lawmakers who felt law enforcement wasn’t the place to pursue cannabis reform, Gaetz withdrew his amendment. But the point was made – there is mounting resistance to the inhumane, logically bankrupt War on Drugs.

“The federal government has lied to the American people for a generation about cannabis,” said Gaetz as his amendment was discussed for about 30 minutes. “There is substantial evidence that indicates that there is a case to be made for the medical efficacy of cannabis in the treatment of mental health and particularly PTSD.”

The Florida Congressman noted for the record, the “idiotic, indefensible policy in this country where we list cannabis as a Schedule I drug.”

The thought of cops using medical cannabis is interesting, considering the violent U.S. police state and its assault on the populace through the war on drugs. Perhaps those cops who actually believe a person should be arrested for a plant would have second thoughts if they actually experienced the benefits of said plant. More importantly, could the extraordinary rate of police-initiated violence go down if cops could toke up after work?

Even though fellow lawmakers assured Gaetz they supported his efforts at cannabis reform, they must have been shocked by the truth bombs he dropped during the hearing. There is no contesting the statements Gaetz made about the lies and the disregard of scientific fact that dominate U.S. drug policy.

These moments of clarity in Congress are refreshing indeed. A day before Gaetz made his statements, Rep. Earl Blumenauer testified before a House Subcommittee on Health that medical cannabis can solve the opioid crisis. He provided strong scientific evidence to make his point and lambasted the “stranglehold” federal government has on cannabis research.